Business Case
CMA wants tools to help them deliver higher value to their customers, including the ability to execute more complex queries across larger data sets and with more user concurrency.
“Customers hammer our storage systems,” says Dougherty. “Most have thousands of users reading from many terabytes of storage and running very, very large queries concurrently. It’s incredibly challenging to deliver predictable, fast response times on those queries.”
CMA also faces increasing demand from its business clients to deliver faster, more predictable response times for their Oracle database queries, deep data mining, analytics, and diverse transactional workloads. In addition, availability is a serious concern since a major outage for a single day could cost the firm millions of dollars in lost revenue.
“Systems Integration and data warehousing are constantly evolving,” says Brian Dougherty, CMA’s Chief Technical Architect. “A good track record is important, but we’ve found the key is to outpace customer demands, stay ahead of the technology curve, and partner with the best technology vendors.”
Using technology solutions from EMC, including DSSD, XtremIO, and VMAX, CMA meets the modern business challenges of building and running today’s data infrastructure:
- Clients demanding faster, more predictable response times for their Oracle applications
- Data growth from business expansion and clients’ increased use of sophisticated data analytics and mining
- Stressed performance and capacity limits of existing storage infrastructure from rapid data growth
- Time to market with data warehouse solutions
The Solution
CMA and EMC believe in doing more with less: We provide our clients with more power, faster technology, better performance, increased flexibility, less power consumption, lower maintenance costs, fewer moving parts, and more.
And recently, CMA spent a few months evaluating the brand-new EMC Flash array option, DSSD D5, in one of their data centers. The appliance delivers superior IOPS, throughput and latency metrics for the most data-intensive applications to enable complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight.
But it was years ago that Dougherty initially set out to find a storage solution that could substantially boost performance and scale, and that would match up well with new generations of faster server platforms, all in a reduced footprint and at a much lower cost than UNIX or Mainframe solutions. The EMC product XtremIO was the game-changing All-Flash array CMA was looking for.
CMA also deployed EMC VMAX 40K enterprise storage across three data centers spanning hundreds of miles. EMC SRDF provides storage replication for disaster recovery. CMA also uses EMC TimeFinder Clone to create local copies for test and development, as well as resolution of support issues.
The Results
With a powerful, highly-reliable EMC infrastructure, CMA has driven the growth of its service provider business substantially by offering enhanced services. The firm can now process client workloads faster than ever before while handling increased data volumes.
From Day one, XtremIO has delivered big performance results for CMA’s data solutions. Shrinking the size of the data appliance and consolidating servers provides significant cost savings. By consolidating storage, CMA has reduced Oracle licensing and maintenance costs for itself and its clients, because low latency on XtremIO pushes CPU higher, allowing the same workload to be completed on fewer cores.
Since deploying VMAX, CMA is able to process unpredictable customer workloads, such as intensive data mining and analytics, with very predictable results. In fact, CMA handles thousands of users running queries against ten-terabyte or larger databases and consistently returns subsecond responses.